SAP Research RoofTop Marketplace

The process of development of Web-based business applications in
companies follows usually the typical process of software
development involving first assessment of user requirements followed
by a long process of development and testing by IT experts. The
functionality of the resulting application is actually a compromise
of user requirements, as not all user requirements can be
considered. As a result, there is a long tail – a term first
coined and popularized by Chris Anderson – of many specific
and heterogeneous user requirements or dynamically changing user
requirements that are not covered by the IT department. A possible
solution for this problem could be a new development paradigm which
integrates the users from the business units characterized by no or
limited programming skills in the software consumption and
development process.

In this context, a new trend for software development and reuse
paradigm known as Enterprise Mashups, has been gaining momentum. At
the core of the Mashup paradigm are two aspects: first, empowerment
of the end user to cover ad hoc and long tail needs by reuse and
combination of existing software resources; and second, broad
involvement of users and developers based on the peer-to-peer
production concept. According to Yochai Benkler, who coined the term
peer-to-peer production, “it refers to production systems that
depend on individual action that is self-selected and decentralized
rather than hierarchically assigned”. Thereby, the creative
energy of large number of people is used to react flexible on
continuous dynamic changes of the business environment. Instead of
long-winded software development processes, existing and new
applications are enhanced with interfaces and provided as user
friendly building blocks.

Driven by the consumer market, upcoming tools and forecasts of
market research institutes like Gartner, Forrester, as well as
leading management consulting firms like McKinsey show the practical
relevance of the Enterprise Mashups paradigm. In particular,
Forrester predicts that Enterprise Mashups will be coming to a $700
million market by 2013.

The SAP Research RoofTop Marketplace prototype is a Web-based
application based on AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). It
represents an inituitive environment to create Enterprise Mashups
without any programming skills.